LJ Idol - Time to Leave

It's one, and the polls close in two hours. I have 68 votes, I need 71 to stay in. I'm nestled on the couch with gratefuladdict, while it rains outside.

"I should go" I say. I have a long drive ahead of me.

It's one thirty. I still need three votes. I could post a link to the polls a second time, or post to emosnail for the first time, but I don't. "I should go" I say

It's two. I still need three votes. I could surely call three people I know with LJs who probably haven't voted yet, but I don't. "I should go"

It's three. The polls should be closed, but I haven't looked at them in an hour or so. "I should go" I say, and finally manage to make it out to my car.

I find my car a box full of rain. Apparently I forgot to close the skylight. Even after closing it, it is still raining in my car. The ceiling continues to drip. The seats, everything is soaked. I didn't really want to leave today anyway. So I rejoin my favourite person I've met in LJ Idol on the couch. But of course, in another sense, I am indeed to leave today.

LJ Idol began with "saying goodbye," but it doesn't end with it. In the end, for me, its about "getting involved."

But yeah, so, in conclusion, I very very easily could have stayed in had I acted on various options I had to drum up an additional three votes, but I realized it was becoming a bit of a treadmill of just how shamelessly can one get the votes they need. Not that there aren't good writers who are getting the votes they need -- there certainly are. But I realized there was a lot of very shameless votemongering, and I didn't want to be part of that. As I've mentioned before, writing doesn't exist in a vacuum, you'll always be writing for an audience. It's been pretty clear for awhile now that MY demographic is different from the LJ Idol demographic. This week 72% of idolists-other-than-myself wrote about personal experiences, and thats been pretty typical of the whole season. I'm not sure I've written a single entry this season about personal experiences. For me, its not about me, I've never seen the point of writing unless its "bigger than myself." But tales of personal reflection and introspection are the bread and butter of idol. And that was the audience and so I enjoyed the challenge of trying to make history and science appeal to an audience that would rather read about what I learned from my last messy breakup. But I still have my own friends list to take into consideration, and that consists of 444 livejournalists who DO like my writing and whom I respect enough that I absolutely refuse to spam them repeatedly over this LJ Idol thing. So in the end, it was just another choice about fitting the audience.